You readers come from many diverse backgrounds, with different family lives, different occupations, and different needs. Our melting pot of a country has prided itself for hundreds of years on such sweeping national experience and the vibrant civil society that it generates. But is this American dream still alive today? I will look at In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, where author Charles Murray argues that it is not. For Murray, the modern welfare state is not only rapidly spending more money than we put into it, but its very structure is damaging the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America. He proposes “the Plan,” a restructuring of the welfare state that will solve both problems. I will review his assertions and show that Murray has a case for change, even though his Plan may be overly optimistic.
Murray defines “the Plan” as abolishing transfer and welfare programs and replacing them with a cash grant of $10,000 a year to every U.S. citizen age 21 or older. Readers will, of course, want to know exactly what programs get eliminated. Murray’s answer is pretty much all of them: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, farm subsidies; in short, any program involving a transfer of money is gone. Despite the initial shock at hearing such a drastic solution, readers will find that Murray provides a plausible and well documented argument for his Plan.
Especially convincing is Murray’s calculation that by the year 2011 his Plan, compared to the current welfare state, will actually save the government money. Whether or not one agrees with the libertarian ideas behind the Plan, In Our Hands is a precise and necessary indictment of government welfare today. Murray is correct in his assertion that a change is needed and will inevitably come about. As he puts it in his introduction, the current system is “within decades of financial and social bankruptcy.”
For the most part, however, Murray takes the superiority of his ideas for granted and only a small part of the book is dedicated to an actual defense of the Plan. The rest of In Our Hands is given to the positive societal effects of the Plan: the dramatic transformation it will unleash upon American culture. It seems that for Murray, $10,000 a year will generate incredible changes in the level of moral responsibility prevalent in this country. The Plan is liable to increase investing for retirement and health care, decrease poverty, convince young men in the underclass to work, lower the divorce rate, and revitalize the vast majority of our civic institutions. It is a panacea of an idea for a plethora of ills.
Perhaps my astute readers have caught the hint of skepticism in my tone above. It is not that I think Murray’s Plan would be unable to do any of his assertions, but that I doubt it will be able to accomplish them all. As appealing as the notion may be, simply giving everyone $10,000 a year will not have the dramatic effects Murray asserts. I contend that his reasoning throughout In Our Hands is often based on loose assumptions about human nature that will not hold in the real world; Murray is an academician and too often reduces human behavior to simple economic choices.
Let us take an example: Murray declares that the Plan will reduce births to single women, an outcome he considers desirable for society: “Under the Plan, the opportunity costs of having a baby will be obvious and alarming to low-income young women in the same way that they have always been obvious and alarming to middle-class and affluent young women.” Such a change will be due to the extra grant money available to the mother if she does not have a child. This assertion makes the assumption that many, if not most, single mothers have a child because of the economic incentives, or at least because they do not see major disincentives. But should we really reduce human behavior to such economic decisions? Many young women may become mothers because of social pressure, desire for a child, or simply an accidental pregnancy.
This example is but one of a hoard of assumptions made by Murray to predict the results of the Plan. The problem is, however, not only that Murray makes such assumptions, but that the assumptions tend to predict great success for the Plan. Such extreme optimism is one of the flaws of In Our Hands and gives rise to a sense of disbelief about the whole system. Only a handful of times does Murray suggest that his Plan could have negative effects, such as potentially increasing the divorce rate among couples where the marriage could be saved. Murray may be right that his Plan can hardly be worse than the current system, and it is something readers would do well to contemplate, but no one system will be quite this perfect.
In Our Hands takes on a necessary task: challenging America’s welfare state and suggesting an alternative solution. Murray’s problem, however, is his extensive focus on the more intangible results of his Plan at the expense of its financially solid benefits. In the end, Murray is using his welfare reforms as a proxy for the libertarian ideal of free markets creating a vibrant society. He would have done well, and been far more convincing in his appeal for the Plan, if he had spent more time on concrete benefits and less on speculation about the resulting changes in society.
All that said, Murray is in the vanguard of economic thought on welfare and reform, providing critiques of the current system that we would do well to listen to. Despite its flaws, I enthusiastically recommend In Our Hands to my readers, not as a perfect solution for America today but as a provocative commentary on the welfare system.
This was a book review written for my Public Policy economics class. The review was ostensibly for a newspaper, thus the particular style of my writing. In addition, as this was a “review” we were to be firm about our positions and my expressed ideas may be a little stronger than my actual ideas. Not my best piece of writing ever, by a long shot, but “that’ll do, Donkey, that’ll do.”Any way around, In Our Hands was a fascinating read and I do recommend it, and not just for economics majors. Now we’re one The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly and perhaps you will get a review of that on the Smidgin as well.
